Learning How To Learn

I've been thinking about writing this series for a while. All throughout the formal education process, I've been forced to learn subjects that were thrown upon me. The only mantra that was taught to me was 'practice'. Put in the hours and you'll learn almost anything. There wasn't any focus on the format of learning. We continued to learn from obsolete sources which further made the process ineffective. Most people go through this for almost 18 years, only because of a delusion about learning and getting 'educated' that was sold to us since childhood.

Learning how to learn is probably the first and most important thing we should have been taught in school. All of human life is a quest to learn and add more to our mental processing system. Yet, it's seemingly bizarre that people always think of learning in a woo-doo manner. People discount the implications of knowledge in the long-term for short term consequential goals. They never realize the right way to learn.

All of human life can broadly be divided into 2 categories, biological needs and mental constructs. Besides our biological needs (food, water.etc), mental constructs are largely who we are. The neural network we hold in our brain is the one that is responsible for anything and everything there is in life. Yet, the source of information is inefficient, inaccurate and sometimes unimportant.

I used to believe that it was something with me when I couldn't "learn" something well in school. But, getting deeper into this, I've realized there's definitely a better approach to learning. There may not be a definite way, but there are guidelines. Learning is a real skill.

I'm going to be writing this in the form of small excerpts that may be a strong foundation for any kind of learning. I'll try to maintain a flow which can help you systematize your learning process.

Process :

Foundation :

Foundation is the first part of the process of learning something new.

• First Principles :

Some of the best performers across the world are known to be using the first-principles methodology. They learn about the core structural components of a subject first. They learn the 'Why' behind the subject. Learning about the fundamentals of any subject has an infinite compounding effect as you go on to learn more. For you to make significant impact in any field, knowing these base concepts well is really important. It make take a while for you to learn these well, but investing the time is worth it.

Most people are information crammers, first-principles show you what the information is and where it came from. This makes a great base for any other surface level technical information that may be required in applying the subject later.

A major plus point of learning the first-principles and core ideas in any subject is that they're cross-disciplinary. They can be applied to multiple situations and topics separate from the one you learnt from. You can use analogies to cross-connect them. I highly recommend reading Range if you wish to understand this further. David Epstein (author) has shared how some of the most radical innovation ideas and solutions come from un-related disciplines.

• History

Uh? History. I didn't understand this until lately. History helps in understanding a lot about a subject. Learning about the history, you can bypass a lot of the false layers of feedback that form on top of knowledge over time. Progress, events, people.etc often influence the way a piece of information is presented to you. Like first-principles, history helps in understanding where a discipline has it's roots. When you know where the subject comes from and can derive it for yourself, you can form a unique set of strong view based on your experiences. Besides, you get a lot of data points about the subject and people who've done great work in that subject to form your views on.

• Resources to learn :

I don't see institutions doing a great job at teaching students the history and foundation of a topic. Even if they share the information, they fail to explain it. I don't blame the teachers and schools though, because they've never been taught about this themselves. This is one of the reasons you should read books by different authors on subjects you're wanting to learn. Great authors often explain the 'Why' behind their matter very well. Besides books, talks, podcasts, videos, conversations.etc with people who're really good at these subjects or have deep insight may often trigger something valuable for you to learn. There's no set limit to how much you should learn before moving on, most of this is a constant process and you should move forward when you think you know enough.

Curiosity-led progress

Ha, curiosity. The phenomenon that got me interested in space when I was a kid. Since then, there have been multiple times I've had the same curiosity for something else but it got shattered. In stale and static environments, curiosity is discouraged. However, in dynamic environments(most of life) curiosity is probably the best catalyst to learn. Curiosity-driven progress in learning is the closest I've come to having immense amounts of fun and effective learning together. If you want to get deeper into this, Paul Graham has got an incredible essay on this here.

• Experimenting

Curiosity driven experiments have the sole purpose of being exciting and shortening the feedback loop. We're innately curious about questions and ideas that seem interesting. In follow-up to the foundation you've built, get on with a few ideas/questions/experiments. If you've been learning about psychology, go out there and run a few experiments. If you've been learning how to code, build something useful for yourself. If you've been learning about writing, push out a few articles.

In most subjects, there's a huge amount of information to possibly learn. Take code for example, if you begin learning Javascript, there're so many frameworks, practices, developments that even the brightest developers may take >5 years to just go through them. And these keep evolving and new stuff is added regularly. You can never keep track of everything in a particular field (there's no fixed syllabus). The best way to thrive is to build real things and learn what it takes to do that.

If you've got a strong base of first-principles, you'll most probably be able to learn any other advanced technical concept without too much effort. Never forget the purpose of why you began learning something in the first place. You had goals in mind that you wanted to accomplish with the skill, do that. A lot of people get trapped into the process of learning a skill endlessly for the sake of it. Most of school is about this too.

Experiments allow you to ship something really quickly. 'Shipping' something is a common slang in the software world for delivering a usable product to the customers. It allows developers to gather immediate feedback and keep iterating. When you're experimenting and trying to build something real, you'll very likely get to know the flaws in your hypothesis quickly. The world of academia operates without feedback loops, which is why nothing you learn there is useful unless you can prove it in real market conditions. Apply the shipping hack to every skill.

• Resources to experiment :

Whatever the skill/subject you're learning, find a way to ship something i.e shorten the feedback loop. If you have a strong social media community, you can do this really efficiently. If you don't have people in your immediate network to reach out to, there are multiple online communities that you can use to share your work. Product Hunt, Medium, Hacker News, Dribbble.etc are some popular ones. Besides, you can also reach out to people who may be able to give you feedback if you're learning something extremely specific.

Changing Dynamics

The third step is where interesting things start to happen. This is the best part of your learning cycle, because this is where you'll learn by doing incredible work. You'll learn things which may not have been explored yet, at a seemingly fast rate. This is genuine learning which creates leverage for you. People don't consider work to be a part of learning, but it's probably where your learning curve is the best. This is one of the reasons I've included this section here. Going through the process of first-principles and practical/experimental progress, you're probably already at a decent level into to skill/subject. You'll be able to manage problems as they come.

• Toy Innovation

Once you're at step 3, you'll see most people getting into doing work which is already established. However, the industry-changing work is most likely going to be far away from the established practices. At best, you can make these spaces more efficient that they were (you can do this with practically everything), but you'll almost never see a 0 to 1 trajectory with the work you do.

The funny thing about industries is, most cutting-edge innovations are dismissed as toys. Here's a YC blog on this too. For you to do impactful work, you've got to spot these toys and work on them. There are a lot of toys that are useless but once you're deeply engrossed with a field, it is possible to can make a considerably accurate guess which toys are likely to be useful. Remember, don't look at the amount of money they make, only the response of the users and their utility.

Toys are just an easier way to redirect you towards spaces where your skill is most useful. And they're pretty much present in any new-age skill/subject/career you may want to work in. The final-step in any learning process is to do something tangible with the skill. You've been doing so with your experiments all throughout, but ultimately there has to be something bigger. Take up these smaller toys that are growing and apply your energy there.

• Cross-connections

One more important component to constantly evolve your learning process is to cross-connect and use analogies from other disciplines. As I've mentioned before, radical innovation usually has derivations from multiple other disciplines. No important change is solely a matter of incremental efficiency. You may find incredible solutions to problems in your discipline from other things you've studied/been involved in. When you're solely focused on one field, you get trapped into a finite view like a closed box. To change dynamics, you need to have a universal view.

When you can cross-connect ideas from different places to produce valuable outcomes in your discipline, you'll unlock a unique position to do impactful work. Do check out Range as mentioned before for deeper insight into this. You can make leaps with the complete view in mind. Plugging in these different pieces together leads to 0 to 1 progress. Just like art. As Kunal Shah has tweeted here.

• Problem-Solving

Ultimately, I think the best test for what you've learnt is ground-level problem solving. Some of the best people I know can seamlessly connect ideas from domains and add their skill on top to find solutions to almost every problem they may encounter. To me, that is the true purpose and nature of education. To learn at the maximum intensity and achieve maximum productive output, I think this is what all of us should focus on.

Concluding

I hope this helped. Overall, I haven't given how-tos and direct steps because they didn't work effectively for me. This process is not something perfect or complete, it's a collection of ideas and practices that work well.